Sydney's Gary Rohan gets moving again

It was supposed to be better. It wasn't still supposed to be sore. The end of Gary Rohan's season was meant to be the end of his battle with his broken leg and the start of whatever happened next, but when he went home to Cobden at the end of the year there it was again. The leg hurt when he ran, it hurt after he ran and it still woke him up at night. The pain wasn't going away, and it had been there for 18 months. Would it, ever? "It was pretty hard not to wonder about it," Rohan said. "I wasn't sure it ever would start going away."

It has, and Rohan no longer even starts to think about whether it might come back. He spends his nights sleeping, now, but it has taken a long time. Rohan was a 20-year-old playing his 22nd game when his right leg was horribly broken in the fourth round of 2012, and a 22-year-old still trying to work out where he might fit into the Swans' team when he cut short his end-of-season break, went back to Sydney and went back to work. "I was happy to get back up there. I wanted to go straight back up there and talk to the physios and do what I could to help it, as soon as I could," he said. "I was a bit sick of just waiting for it to get better."

Rohan broke his leg against North Melbourne in 2012. Photo: Quentin Jones

The wait didn't end when he got there, and when Rohan was still sore at the start of the season despite doing everything the conditioning staff had told him to do, he wondered again if this was just his new reality. He played the first four games of the season but knew every time he got even the slightest knock to his leg that it would hurt afterwards, a lot. It was difficult to deal with, as were other, less tangible things.

"When he got injured he was a young kid, really. He'd hardly played, so he didn't really know whether he belonged in the team or how important he was to us," said Sydney coach John Longmire. "I knew it, and the players knew it, and we kept telling him how much we needed him back. But he didn't know. He hadn't been in the team long enough to have that confidence himself, so at the start of the year he was hurting, he was always sore and he also had all those doubts."

The answer: time in the twos. For a couple of reasons. "He needed to play and he needed to get some game time," Longmire said. "That was really important, and we had to take away some of that pressure. We told him he was going back there for a while, for quite a few weeks, and that we wanted him back when he was ready."

Rohan was also given a new job, in the back line, knowing he had time to get used to playing there. In part, it was because Longmire and Sydney's other coaches thought he would play well there, given his speed and and dare, his willingness to either chase players down or take off with the ball. It was also because they wanted to give him something to think about, other than his leg.

A picture of Rohan in hospital that was posted on Twitter. Photo: Twitter

It worked. Rohan came back into the senior team nine games later, and felt ready to be there. He didn't feel like a young kid being given a chance as one of the last few players picked, or like someone being eased back in after a bad injury. The pain was gone and it felt like his broken leg had happened a long time ago because it had: more than two years had passed. Playing in the back line wasn't something he had needed to learn from scratch, because he had done it as a carefree junior. Becoming slightly less adventurous took some practice, though.

"It's different. It wasn't too bad because I'd played there before, but there's a lot more things to think about at this level because every mistake matters more. You have to think about when to go, when to hold onto the ball and you have to have your opponent in the back of your head all the time you're doing all those other things," Rohan said. "But I like it. It's been good. It helped me stop thinking so much about my leg, definitely. When I got back in I thought, it wasn't so bad to not be in the team for a few weeks. When I got back, I felt like I deserved it."

He wants to keep feeling that way. Longmire wants him to, too, and his teammates have kept reminding him. Rohan doesn't understand how anyone could feel entirely safe playing for such a good team, but at least feels like that is the next step for him, and what all those people around him want too. "Everyone's been really good, all the coaches and all my teammates. It would have been hard to go through such a long rehab without them because they've always made me feel like they want me here," he said. "They always made me feel like they wanted me to come back and play footy with them, and it helped a lot. I just want to keep on doing it, now."